SO UH, A NEW MARIO & LUIGI GAME WAS JUST ANNOUNCED OUT OF NOWHERE!!!! WHAT?!?!?!?

as a m&l fan i just want to say HOLY FUCK i never expected them to pick up the series again, i am SO excited to play this game

as a fangame developer, however, i feel like i need to talk about a few things.

COPYRIGHT ISSUES

so, there's a new issue that's popped up for shadowfell. copyright.

the idea of shadowfell saga is a mario & luigi-styled fangame where papyrus & sans get sucked into a food-themed dark world, sailing between tropical islands to try and find the "dark lord", a character which i won't reveal anything about right now. there's also a pirate-y theme in the areas, presentation etc.

nintendo has quite a brutal reputation with fangames, constantly taking them down, dishing out legal threats, etc. making a mario & luigi fangame SPECIFICALLY was one i felt pretty safe about, however, since the company that made the mario & luigi games went out of business and i don't believe any of the games were being sold in any official capacity for a while.

because the series wasn't active, and because i felt that despite the similarities, that the game was different enough from the official m&l games, i went ahead with working on it.

now there's a problem. the series is active again, and the most recent installment involves mario & luigi being sucked into another world, with island-hopping and pirate-y theming.

on top of all that, the bros attacks (i think?) seem to take influence from the superstar saga bros attacks, involving acrobatics and being heavily movement-based which was also something that was in plans for shadowfell.

while there's no food-theming (as far as i can tell), YEAH. THIS IS KINDA PROBLEMATIC.

of course, these similarities are somewhat broad strokes, but as much as i want to doubt that nintendo would take down a fangame just for being SOMEWHAT similar to an official game, it is now a possibility, however small. it's not something i want to think about, the fact that all of my hard work could be erased just like that.

(just to clarify, this isn't a dig on nintendo or anything and i want to make it absolutely clear that i am NOT accusing them of plagiarism. this game looks like it was in the works for a long time, so it's safe to say it was parallel thinking. that being said, even though shadowfell has been public for a while now, i don't doubt that nintendo COULD abuse copyright to take down the game.)

EXPECTATIONS & MOTIVATION

this new game also introduces a significant artstyle change to the series. stylized full 3d, smooth animations, the works.

while this might sound a little self-centered, i feel like people are going to think of the mario & luigi series in a certain way after this new game release and i feel like it'll be harder to hold up to those new expectations.

i'm going to be honest, i feel like i revealed shadowfell WAY too early. the game still doesn't even have a working battle system, because of countless setbacks and restarting-things-from-scratch-isms and the like. on top of this, it is a LOT of work to make a mario & luigi-type game.

making a JRPG is already extremely difficult, but adding active battle mechanics, 2.5d platforming AND other gimmicks and minigames is monumentally difficult for an indie creator. ask anyone who's working on anything that even moderately resembles m&l and they'll probably testify that it's extremely difficult.

(check out depper jar and stellar bonds. they're both pretty cool)

i've been working on an original game recently (partly so i have some kind of revenue stream coming in from game development) but i've found my motivation dwindling more and more on fangames. as fun as they are, it can feel kind of limiting when you're chaining yourself to an already-established IP, and committing to making that game while receiving absolutely no revenue because it's a nonprofit fangame is very difficult.

i have thought about taking the fun ideas from shadowfell and putting them into an original game, but i feel like the skelebros are a pretty central part of this game's identity. so, i'm kind of stuck.

all this to say, shadowfell saga is now on indefinite hiatus.

before, i optimistically said the game would go back into development in august, but i want to do a few things before i start work on the game again, if i do.

a) play through brothership, and see any other points of similarity between the games to avoid copyright issues.

b) change a lot of stuff behind the scenes. i had a lot of ideas for the game that i now feel aren't very creative, partly due to some of them being common tropes and partly due to newly revealed stuff like brothership.

c) have a real hard think about if i should make this an original project instead. a lot of original games start off as fangames, but i feel like removing all the characters or worldbuilding that make the game undertale-y or mario & luigi-y would take away a lot from its identity.

if shadowfell DOES get out of hiatus someday, i'm probably going to be a lot more secretive about it.
i feel like i have a problem with sharing things about projects and getting excited about them way too early in dev and i want to stop that.

sorry for all the bad news today!

if i do definitively decide to cancel the project, i'll let you all know.

thank you for the support.